Don't Like Content Farms? Help Google Block Them

All you unpaid journalists and guardians of content quality can finally take revenge on the content arms clogging up your search results. Google released an extension for the Chrome browser that lets you blacklist sites from your searches -- and that sends that data back to Google. Presumably when a site reaches a certain threshold, its PageRank would drop, hurting its chances of showing up high in search results. GigaOm says it's a case of Google putting the onus on users to differentiate the real from the almost spam:

Google seems to be further acknowledging that it's got an issue here. The company previously said it's working on dealing with content farms. But now, it's empowering people to actually single out sites and block them. It's a quick and dirty way to address the problem by shifting the burden on to users instead of Google taking more of an active approach. It may be that Google is looking for better guidance on what people think a low-quality content farm. One person's how-to video is another person's spam.